Craft Men
John Davis Jr.
Our Cub Scouts den mother forced us to fashion
cowboys from pipe cleaners, pirates from clothespins.
Tender fingers turned white wood and fuzzy wire
into characters colored by vinegar-scented markers.
Real men she called them: gunslingers, swashbucklers
rainbowed with glitter and dime-store puffy paint
until their figures twinkled and glowed in the dark
of small-town bedrooms clad in deep reds and blues.
When we pressed them into battle, their decorations
flecked loose, embedding in fingertip ridges
until a new Tuesday when we would repair them –
splintered, malformed in a land of bandanas and sashes.
John Davis Jr. is the author of Hard Inheritance (Five Oaks Press, 2016), Middle Class American Proverb (Negative Capability Press, 2014), and two other collections of poetry. His poems have appeared in venues such as Nashville Review, Steel Toe Review, One, The Common, and The American Journal of Poetry, among many others. He holds an MFA from University of Tampa and teaches college English courses in Florida.